by CL Skelton
‘It must be ten years,’ he said.
‘Yes, indeed,’ she answered. ‘Are you really the Duke?’
‘Oh, that’s true enough. I fear that my story since we parted is not a very happy one.’
‘You lost your brother, that is obvious. I’m sorry about that.’
‘Not only my brother, my wife also. She died in childbirth; it was her fourth. Life seemed very empty after that until this lot started. I joined a yeomanry regiment, spent about five minutes in action, and ended up here.’ He smiled. ‘Not a very distinguished military career. It’s good to see you, though.’
‘Thank you, Charles,’ she said. ‘But why didn’t you come to me when all of this happened?’
‘I spent the happiest time of my life with you. I was afraid of spoiling the memory.’
‘I see.’
‘Are you going to look after me?’
‘Not really. This is not my ward. I look at the admission lists each day in case there’s someone I know. That’s how I found you. Just now I’m on nights, in B ward. So I’ll be able to come and see you during the late afternoons. That is, if you’d like me to.’
‘You know that I would.’
Strangely, she felt awkward in his presence. It was that awkwardness which comes when meeting someone with whom one has been intimate, after a long passage of time.
‘I’m glad that you are not badly wounded,’ she said.
‘No, it’s not really bad at all. It’s not even enough to get me shipped off home. I’ll be out of here in a couple of weeks and … back there, I suppose. Wherever “there” is. Naomi, do you mind if I tell you that I think you look as beautiful as ever?’
‘In this?’ she said, laughing at her plain linen blue-and-white hospital uniform.
‘You could make a sack look like a ball gown.’
‘You are very kind, Charles. And I am sure that after you have had a shave, you will look as handsome as ever. And now you must excuse me because I must get some sleep.’
‘So soon?’
‘I’ll come and see you this afternoon at about half past four. Perhaps if they let you out of bed, we might take tea together outside.’
‘I promise to shave before then,’ he said.
For the next two weeks they met every afternoon for tea on the hospital lawn. Their conversations were mainly light reminiscences, nothing serious. Though they were not as they had been, or so it seemed, they were still very good friends and fond of each other. The one thing that they never discussed was their last meeting in London, not until the day that Charles appeared without his arm in a sling and with the news that he was expecting to be discharged from hospital within the week.
‘Do you still wear your pearls?’ he asked.
She coloured slightly. ‘I look at them every day,’ she said. ‘But I don’t wear them very often.’
‘You have them with you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then you must wear them for me.’
Naomi laughed. ‘Really, Charles. Can you imagine me being seen here wearing Marie Antoinette’s pearls? Matron would … I’m not sure what she would do, but it would be something pretty awful.’
‘Naomi, I …’ And he stopped.
‘What is it, Charles?’
‘I haven’t asked you before, but, you’re not married yet?’
‘No, Charles.’
‘But there have been other men.’
‘Many.’
‘Will you marry me?’
‘But you admitted yourself, that is impossible.’ She had not even paused after his question.
‘Not any more.’
‘What if there were children?’
‘I hope that there would be.’
‘Even if one of them was coloured?’ She looked at him frankly as she spoke.
‘It wouldn’t matter much, not now.’
‘Why?’
‘I have an heir, and if anything happened to him, he has a younger brother.’
Naomi’s face hardened. ‘Charles, for a moment I almost said yes. But now …’
‘I have been honest, Naomi.’
‘Yes, Charles. And I thank you for that. I don’t think that it would be right for me to let you take the risk. You would not want to soil the line; you would be haunted by the ghosts of your forefathers. They wouldn’t approve.’
‘But, my dear, it’s you I want. Don’t you understand?’ He was pleading with her now.
‘Come and see me when you get to London. You’ll always be welcome. And now I really must go.’
He watched her as she disappeared into the main building, then angrily he kicked his chair over and strode off in the opposite direction.
Chapter Eight
The Maclarens were not destined to stay long in Durban. It was good while it lasted, but they had not been badly mauled at Colenso, and by the twelfth of January they were on the march again. This time over hundreds of miles of veld, twenty-four miles a day. They were heading for the Modder River in the Orange River Colony. There they had orders to search out and find General Methuen’s force and place themselves under his orders.
The long march itself was a symphony of monotony and a triumph of endurance. Each day was exactly the same as the one before. The same blank horizon, the same dark-blue sky. The same shimmering heat rising from the dust. The same thorn bushes and the same patches of arid red grass. Day after day, week after week. There was so much of nothing that on one occasion Sergeant Smith assured Private Alasdair Maclaren that they were walking round in circles waiting for the war to be over and Maclaren almost believed what he was told. There were, however, few attempts at humour. It was long, it was hot, and devoid of any sort of diversion.
Once they spotted a group of black tribesmen, leaning on their hunting spears and watching them.
‘I tell ye yin thing,’ said MacTavish. ‘That lot think that we are mad and they’re no far wrong.’
But that little incident apart, they hardly saw a living soul. It was just one step after another. Backs aching from the weight of their packs. The metal of their rifles so hot that they could barely touch them. They carried everything with them. Two Maxim guns, all the stores that they needed for a month out in the open, drawn by mules on wooden carts which kept having to be repaired. They even had their own medical unit, Captain Gordon Mackintosh of the R.A.M.C. and three orderlies having been assigned to them in Durban. They for their part had accumulated vast quantities of gregory’s powder and castor oil for the inevitable bouts of diarrhoea alternating with constipation with which the men were afflicted. Once on the move, there was no turning back. If a man was ill, he had to be dumped into a cart, and if he died, as three of their number did, he was buried by the wayside in a shallow grave with a few rocks piled upon it after Ian had read a passage from his Bible.
They had started gaily enough. Their piper, Angus McLeod, played as they marched out onto the open veld. Young voices rose in songs like ‘Dolly Gray’ and of course their own irreverent version of a popular hymn tune:
We are Maclaren’s army,
The Highland Infantry,
We cannot fight, we cannot sing,
What bloody use are we?
And when we get to Cronje
We’ll hear the bastard say,
Hoch, hoch, mein Gott,
What a bloody fine lot
To earn a bob a day.
But long before the end of the journey Ian and his officers were devoting all of their energies to keeping up the morale of the men they were leading.
For Gordon Bruce the long march was no hardship. They were heading in the direction of Kimberley where his mother and his niece and nephews were still under siege. He hoped and prayed that it might fall to the Maclarens to raise that siege. But Gordon was alone in his anxiety to press on. For the rest of them, it was a searing hot, eventless bore.
Every evening when they bivouacked for the night, Ian held a conference with his officers, all armed with maps and compasses, to d
ecide on the route for the following day. This was the most vital part of the entire exercise as they had to find water every few days, or horses, pack animals, and men would never survive. A decision having been made, forward pickets were sent out to look for hostile Boers and for signs that water was ahead for them. The pickets were mounted on what few saddle horses they possessed and would send a man back as soon as they knew the way was clear for the column, the balance of them bivouacking and waiting for the column to catch up.
It was on the morning of February the eighth that the forward picket sent word back to Ian that they had sighted Methuen’s camp. It was Corporal Anderson who brought the news to Ian just as they were striking camp and preparing for another day’s foot-slogging.
‘I niver seed naethin’ like it, sirr. It was like a great city. There was tents and campfires fer as far as ye could look.’
‘How far are they, Corporal?’ asked Ian, his face showing the relief he felt now that the long march was nearly ended.
‘Aboot twelve miles, sirr. That’s what Captain Maclaren said.’
‘Thank you, Corporal. Tell the R.S.M. that I want to see him.’
‘Sirr.’ Corporal Anderson saluted and went off in search of Frankie Gibson.
‘Well, Sergeant-Major,’ said Ian as soon as Frankie had arrived, ‘we’re nearly there. How do you think the men would feel if we were to have a short march today and then bivvy in time for everyone to get cleaned up before we march into the camp?’
‘How far would we have to march today, sir?’ asked Frankie.
‘Not more than ten miles. We’ll head straight for the river and spend the afternoon bathing and cleaning up, and then tomorrow morning we’ll march into that camp and show them what a Highland regiment looks like after four hundred miles.’
‘I think that the men would appreciate it, sir. There’ll be work tae dae as soon as we make camp, and it’ll be mair like a wee holiday if we dae it as you suggest.’
‘Right, Sergeant-Major, we’ll move out in an hour. Send Anderson back to recall the picket. We’ll head straight for the Modder and camp there tonight.’
Methuen’s camp came into sight briefly during the morning’s march. It was a city of tents which spread as far as the eye could see. The hot sand on which it was based gave off shimmering waves of heat into the upper air. They were tired and they were foot weary. But in spite of all this they paused and looked and wondered. Never had any of them seen so much military might within the compass of a single glance. There were men, guns, mountain after mountain of supplies, little tents and big tents in the thousands, and hundreds and hundreds of horses and oxen in a vast, steaming menagerie. Beyond the camp lay the Modder, and beyond the Modder the Boers.
This was the force that had been assembled during the months since the war had started and rushed out to the Cape. This was the force that was going to crush the Boers and get them, the Maclarens, back home.
Ian looked with something approaching awe as the massive panorama unfolded before his eyes. He had brought nearly nine hundred men over four hundred miles of open veld. He had lost only three on the way, and, that apart, his battalion was intact. He looked back at his men, the long, straggling column, all khaki, all the same colour as the land they trod; even their kilts were hidden from view by the aprons which had been issued to them before they left Durban. But he looked back with swelling pride. These were the Maclarens, his men, his family, and if they could do what they had done in these last weeks, then they could do anything. A battle would be a pleasant divertissement after this.
Once the camp was in view, about five miles’ distant, Ian took his column to the right and headed to the river. There they bivouacked. There they stripped naked and splashed about in the water. There they polished and cleaned and washed and shaved so that they were almost as neat and smart as if they had been going on parade at their home barracks.
They stayed there until the afternoon of the ninth and then, with pipes and drums playing, rifles at the slope, and marching at attention, they entered the camp and down the broad lines of tents. It was with shoulders squared and heads held high in the pride of their regiment that they looked with contempt at the listless, slow-moving troops as they passed them. They were the Maclarens, the right of the line, the terrors of the Punjab, the bloodsuckers of Burma, and the pride of the British Army. And they were proving it.
They had discarded their aprons and Ian at their head was wearing a pair of tartan breeches and mounted on his charger. He halted the battalion between the lines of tents, dismounted, and called a passing officer.
‘I want to report to the C-in-C. Where will I find him?’
‘His tent is about a hundred yards down this line on the right, sir,’ said the man, looking curiously beyond Ian at the battalion as they stood strictly to attention, not one man moving a muscle. ‘You might find him busy, though; he only got here yesterday.’
‘But I thought General Methuen had been here for months,’ said Ian.
The young officer smiled. ‘General Methuen is not the C-in-C. Lord Roberts has arrived. He is taking charge of the whole operation.’
‘Oh,’ said Ian. ‘Thank you. I had better report to him all the same. Sergeant-Major,’ he called, ‘stand the men easy.’
At last, Ian thought, he was going to meet him, that legendary figure, Field-Marshal Frederick Sleigh Roberts, Baron Roberts of Kandahar, and known throughout the army as ‘Little Bobs’. He had been born in Cawnpore in 1832, long before the Mutiny in which he had served with great gallantry and distinction, being awarded the Victoria Cross.
Probably his most famous feat, and that which had captured the public imagination more than the feat of any other soldier since Wellington at Waterloo, was marching his army for three hundred miles across the barren wastes of northern India from Kabul to the relief of the besieged garrison at Kandahar.
Ian thought of these things, of the man who had become a legend in his own lifetime, as he walked down the lines to the field-marshal’s tent. Outside the tent an A.D.C. was sitting at a trestle table dealing with some papers.
‘Good afternoon,’ said Ian.
The A.D.C. looked up. ‘Oh, good afternoon, sir. Can I help you?’
‘I would like to see the field-marshal,’ replied Ian.
‘I’m afraid he’s very busy,’ said the A.D.C. ‘Is it something I can deal with?’
‘I have just brought a battalion four hundred miles across Africa in order to join his force. I thought that it would be my duty to report to him personally.’
The young captain was impressed. ‘If you’ll just wait a moment, sir, I’ll see if the C-in-C can spare you a few minutes.’
‘Thank you,’ said Ian.
The young man disappeared into the tent and returned within a matter of seconds. ‘What battalion are you with, sir?’ he asked.
‘The Maclaren Highlanders,’ replied Ian.
‘He thought you might be; he says that he will see you immediately. If you care to go in now, sir?’
Ian walked into the tent and saluted. Before him sat a little man; tiny would probably be a more accurate description, for he was only five feet three inches tall, two inches below the minimum height for enlisted soldiers in the regular army. He was sitting behind a plain wooden table, wearing a khaki forage cap which covered a head of iron-grey hair. He had a large white moustache which drooped over and beyond his upper lip, and curled away upwards at the ends. He wore a plain khaki tunic which was rumpled and completely devoid of any adornment. It bore not even the ribbon of his V.C. His neck was scrawny and the skin of his face and hands was leathery and creased by a thousand wrinkles. The thing which struck Ian most was his eyes; they were pale and bright, and when he looked up seemed to bore right through the man standing before him.
He finished reading the document with which he was occupied when Ian entered, initialled it, and looked at Ian.
‘You are the commanding officer of the Maclaren Highlanders,’ he said in a t
hin, piping voice which in no way matched his reputation.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Yes,’ said Roberts, ‘I believe I met your father once. How many men have you brought me?’
‘Eight hundred and fifty, sir. And three Maxims,’ replied Ian.
‘Good, good,’ was the reply. ‘And your name?’
‘Lieutenant-Colonel Maclaren, sir.’
‘Family, eh?’ said Roberts with approbation. ‘Yes, it was your father I met.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Ian, permitting himself a little smile in the awesome presence.
‘Well, Colonel, if there is anything you need, tell my A.D.C., Captain Leslie. And tell him I told you that if he can give it to you, then he is to do so. How are your men? They must have taken a hammering on that march.’
‘They’re fit and well, sir. They could go into action this afternoon if you wished.’
‘Hm,’ said Roberts, raising his bushy eyebrows.
‘My men are rested and ready for anything, sir.’
‘I hope you mean that, Colonel; we have a long way to go,’ said Roberts. ‘Well, I’ll send for you as soon as I can let you know our plans in detail.’
‘Sir?’ said Ian.
‘Yes,’ said the field-marshal a little testily. He had regarded his last remark as a dismissal. ‘What is it?’
‘Sir, might I be so bold as to ask, are we going to relieve Kimberley?’
‘You’re not,’ said Roberts, ‘but we are.’
‘We, sir?’
‘Yes. It will be mainly a cavalry action.’ Then, seeing the look on Ian’s face, ‘Don’t you agree with me, young man?’
‘Oh no, sir, I would not presume to disagree, sir. It’s just that …’
‘Well, come on, out with it. I haven’t got all day, you know.’
‘Well, sir, it’s one of my officers. His mother and three orphaned nephews and niece are in Kimberley.’ Ian forgave himself the white lie for he could not bear to mention Donald at this juncture. ‘He’s been very excited about the fact that we are approaching Kimberley and is hoping desperately that he might be in the relief force.’
‘Is he a good man?’ asked Roberts.
‘One of the best, sir,’ answered Ian. ‘He’s a Maclaren Highlander.’